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PHOENIX — As an Arizona highway patrol officer for 14 years in the 1970s and ’80s, Dick Landis chased illegal immigrants, drunken college students, speeding motorists and even hardened drug dealers up and down just about every strip of concrete slicing through the state’s scalding, lonely desert.

An accounting rules shift could trigger fundamental changes in a truck leasing market worth as much as $70 billion by reducing the attractiveness of renting equipment and reducing fleets’ access to debt.

Two senior House Democratic leaders last week introduced a sweeping greenhouse gas bill that includes a cap-and-trade program and would expand motor carriers’ use of SmartWay technologies.

Budget committees in Congress have approved draft versions of spending-revenue plans for next year that reject an Obama administration proposal to remove the firewalls that have traditionally protected the Highway Trust Fund and other transportation-related funds.

The Department of Transportation will develop a proposal to reopen the United States to trucks from Mexico before President Obama visits President Felipe Calderon there later this month, a spokeswoman told Transport Topics.

An Illinois jury has awarded $23.8 million in damages against leading freight broker C.H. Robinson Worldwide in a dual-fatality 2004 truck accident case involving a motor carrier hired to haul a load of potatoes.

President Obama named two nominees to lead agencies within the Department of Transportation, the White House said.

The U.S. economy’s service sector continued to contract in March, the Institute for Supply Management said Friday.

Rail and intermodal traffic both fell last week compared with a year ago, the Association of American Railroads said.

Less-than-truckload carrier Con-way Freight will take over the final leg of express shipments from Europe under a new partnership with Dutch transportation and logistics firm TNT.